Belgium missing €1.5 billion for social security expenditures in current budget

Thursday, 27 June 2019

Credit Belga

The Social Security deficit should explode at 1.45 billion euro in 2019, according to information obtained by Le Soir.

“The government is balancing its budget by greatly overestimating the impact of its policies on revenue and poorly measuring its costs. In short, expenses are higher than expected and income is much lower,” someone close to the case said, quoted by Le Soir.

On top of which exogenous factors could be added to further impact the budget negatively such as a coming Federal Planning Bureau review on economic growth. In addition, pension expenses is also constantly growing.

The 2020 budget scenario now shows an increase in revenue by 2.7 billion euro, and an increase in expenditure by 3.3 billion euro.

The Social Security Management Committee will meet on Friday to analyse the figures and the underlying factors behind them.